Love ads on your XBOX 360? Great then you wont be dissapointed with the Xbox One dash then. The Xbox one dashboard is set to have more "intergrate" adverts. What does intergrated adverts mean? Well basically it means that you will be clicking the dam ads instead of your games (or movies ... blah ) , thats what it means XPG... Stick Twiddler's Ben Cordell had an opportunity to go eyes-on with the Xbox One's dashboard at a recent press event, where Microsoft press representatives walked him through the ins and outs of using the Xbox One, explaining the benefits and honest disadvantages of Kinect, and how the dashboard ads have been revamped to get people more inclined to click on the ads, with the Senior Digital Art Director/UX Designer saying... "On Xbox, the ad is part of the actual experience, it's not something that is outside. The only difference is that the advertisement we have is quite small and not disruptive so people are not aware of clicking on the banners because they know this is a part of the whole experience on the dash,"... "So the users know that this is something that when they click on it, they won't be hit by something crazy or something dangerous like on the web. Everything that lands there, we create." At Microsoft, apparently it's an important objective to get these ads out there and the click-through rates up as high as possible. In fact, that's one of their goals using the new Windows 8 OS core for navigation and aesthetics, which would give users an easier time to blend their click-throughs of music, movies and games with recommended ads. I kid you not. According to Cordell... The Xbox team are utilising something called ‘native advertising' which is when the adverts are built into the actual content, as opposed to tacked on at the side or above. Statistics have shown that this sort of advertising achieves 52% more clicks than traditional advertising and combats ‘ad blindness' - a situation where you automatically ignore advertising space on websites. Now what we have here with the "native advertising" sounds a lot like a less intrusive version of Square Enix's Core Online service, which seems to be the natural progression of ad-based commercialism in video games.
